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Introduction

It’s a visual world these days. Want your Facebook friends to see
what you’re having for lunch? Post a picture. Need an extra
whatchamacallit from the hardware store? Just show them a photo. It’s just
so much easier than trying to describe such things with words.
Everybody has a digital camera now. Most likely, even
your cellphone is a pretty competent little camera. But there are two
problems with all this photo-y goodness: People’s expectations of photos
are pretty high now, and keeping track of so many images can be a
nightmare that may make you long for the days when all your family photos
fit in one shoebox.

Enter Photoshop Elements. Not only does Elements 10 give you
terrific tools for editing and improving your photos, but you also get a
free account at Photoshop.com, making it incredibly easy to share photos
on your personal Photoshop.com web page, back them up automatically,
and sync them between your computers.

Note

For now, you have to be in the United States to use Photoshop.com.
If you’re in another country, you can create and share online albums at
Adobe’s Photoshop Showcase (www.photoshopshowcase.com),
a site first created for folks using Elements 6. Alas, a few features
are available only with Photoshop.com, so for now, these features are
U.S.-only.

Elements also includes a great photo organizer (aptly named the
Organizer), which used to be available only in the Windows version of
Elements, but now Mac folks get it, too. And since more and more people
are using a mix of Windows computers and Macs, as long as you buy the
boxed version (not the download) you can install the same copy of Elements
10 on either platform, so you don’t have to buy two separate versions of
the program (see Installing Elements in Windows for
more about this).

Why Photoshop Elements?

Adobe Photoshop is the granddaddy of all image-editing programs.
It’s the Big Cheese, the industry standard against which everything else
is measured. Every photo you’ve seen in a book or magazine in the past
15 years or so has almost certainly passed through Photoshop on its way
to being printed. You just can’t buy anything that gives you more
control over your pictures than Photoshop does.

But Photoshop has some big drawbacks: It’s darned hard to learn,
it’s horribly expensive, and many of the features in it are just plain
overkill if you don’t work on pictures for a living.

For several years, Adobe tried to find a way to cram many of
Photoshop’s marvelous powers into a package that normal people could
use. Finding the right formula was a slow process. First came
PhotoDeluxe, a program that was lots of fun but came up short when you
wanted to fine-tune how the program worked. Adobe
tried again with Photoshop LE, which many people felt included all the
difficulty of full Photoshop, but still gave too little of what you
needed to do top-notch work.

Finally—sort of like “The Three Bears”—Adobe got it just right
with Photoshop Elements, which took off like crazy because it offers so
much of Photoshop’s power in a program that almost anyone can learn.
With Elements, you too can work with the same wonderful tools that the
pros use. Elements has been around for quite a while now and, in each
new version, Adobe has added lots of push-button-easy ways to correct
and improve your photos.

What You Can Do with Elements 10

Elements not only lets you make your photos look great, but also
helps you organize your photos and gives you some pretty neat projects
in which to use them. The program even comes loaded with lots of easy
ways to share photos. The list of what Elements can do is pretty
impressive. You can use it to:

Add all kinds of special effects to images, like turning a
garden-variety photo into a drawing, painting, or even a tile
mosaic.

Combine photos into a panorama or montage.

Move someone from one photo to another, and even remove people
(your ex?) from last year’s holiday photos.

Repair and restore old and damaged photos.

Organize your photos and assign keywords to them so you can
search by subject or name.

Add text to images and turn them into things like greeting
cards and flyers.

Create slideshows to share with friends, regardless of whether
they use Windows, a Mac, or even just a cellphone.

Automatically resize photos so they’re ready to email either
as regular email attachments or in specially designed emails.

Create digital artwork from scratch, even without a photo to
work from.

Create and share incredible online albums and email-ready
slideshows that will make your friends actually
ask to see your vacation photos.

Store photos online so you can get to them from any computer.
You can organize your photos online, and upload new images directly to your personalized Photoshop.com
website. You can also keep an online backup of your photos, and even
sync albums so that when you add a new photo from another computer, it automatically gets
sent to your home computer, too.

Create and edit graphics for websites.

Create wonderful projects like collages and calendars that you
can print or share with your friends digitally. Scrapbookers—get
ready to be wowed.

It’s worth noting, though, that there are still a few things
Elements can’t do. While the program handles text
quite competently, at least as photo-editing programs go, it’s still no
substitute for QuarkXPress, InDesign, or any other desktop-publishing
program. And Elements can do an amazing job of fixing problems in your
photos, but only if you give it something to work with. If your photo is
totally overexposed, blurry, and the top of everyone’s head is cut off,
there’s a limit to what even Elements can do to salvage it. (C’mon, be fair.)
The fact is, though, you’re more likely to be surprised by what Elements
can fix than by what it can’t.

What’s New in Elements 10

Elements 10 doesn’t have quite as many new features as the last
few versions have had, since this time around Adobe put a lot of their
effort into fixing bugs in the underlying code, but it’s still got some
great new features:

Text on a path (Artistic Text). In Elements 10 you can create text that runs around
in a circle or follows the outline of a shape or an object in your
photo.

Brush-on textures (Controlling the Colors You See). The Smart Brush tools now let you add textures to
areas in your photos. These new settings are especially nice for
creating the digital equivalent of photographer’s backdrops.

New crop overlays (The Crop Tool). When you decide to trim down a photo, Elements 10
has a new overlay feature to help you decide where to crop it. You
can choose a basic grid or one that helps you position your subjects
according to the Rule of Thirds or the Golden Ratio.

New Guided Edits (Guided Edit). Elements 10 gives you two new Guided Edits, where
the program walks you through the steps for creating effects that
might be difficult to figure out on your own. You can now create the
popular Orton effect (where everything is dreamily blurred) or make
a photo look like it’s been split up into many photos. And there’s
one to help you create the look of a shallow depth of field, with
only the subject in focus, from photos where everything in the
background was originally in focus, too.

New Organizer searches (Searching by Metadata). Elements has been able to search for and identify people in your photos for a
while now, but Elements 10 can also search through your photos to
find pets or objects.

Mobile app compatibility. If
you have a touch-sensitive tablet like an iPad, you can use Adobe’s
special apps to help control Elements or to create new colors or
artwork and send them wirelessly, straight to Elements. (As of this
writing, these apps are only for iPad, but Adobe plans
to make them available for Android tablets, too.)

Windows screen resolution
fix. If you’ve used past versions of the Windows
Organizer, you know it had some problems if you set your screen
resolution too high, like not being able to read the bar at the top
of the Organizer. These have been fixed in Elements 10.

Elements vs. Photoshop

You could easily get confused about the differences between
Elements and the full version of Adobe Photoshop. Because Elements is so
much less expensive, and because many of its more advanced controls are
tucked away, a lot of Photoshop aficionados tend to view Elements as
some kind of toy version of their program. They couldn’t be more wrong:
Elements is Photoshop, but it’s Photoshop adapted
for use with a home printer, and for the Web.

The most important difference between Elements and Photoshop is
that Elements doesn’t let you work or save in CMYK mode, which is the format used for commercial color
printing. (CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and blacK. Your inkjet
printer also uses those ink colors to print, but it expects you to give
it an RGB file, which is what Elements creates. Don’t worry—this is all explained
in Chapter 7.)

Elements also lacks several tools that are basic staples in any
commercial art department, like the ability to write
actions (to help automate repetitive tasks), the
extra color control you can get from Selective Color, and the Pen tool’s
special talent for creating vector paths. Also, for some special
effects, like creating drop shadows or bevels, the tool you’d use—Layer
styles—doesn’t have as many settings in Elements as it does in
Photoshop. The same holds true for a handful of other Elements
tools.

And although Elements is all most people need to create graphics
for the Web, it doesn’t come with the advanced tools in Photoshop, which
let you do things like automatically slice images into smaller pieces
for faster web display. If you use Elements, then you have to look for
another program to help out with that.

The Key to Learning Elements

Elements may not be quite as powerful as Photoshop, but it’s still
a complex program, filled with more features than most people ever use.
The good news is that the Quick Fix window (Chapter 4) lets you get started right away, even if you
don’t understand every last option that Quick Fix presents you with. And
you also get Guided Edit mode (Guided Edit), which
provides step-by-step walkthroughs of some popular editing tasks, like
sharpening a photo or cropping it to fit on standard photo paper.

As for the program’s more complex features, the key to learning
how to use Elements—or any other program, for that matter—is to focus
only on what you need to know for the task you’re currently trying
to accomplish.

For example, if you’re trying to use Quick Fix to adjust the color
of your photo and crop it, don’t worry that you don’t get the concept of
“layers” yet. You won’t learn to do everything in Elements in a day or
even a week. The rest will wait until you need it, so take your time and
don’t worry about what’s not important to you right now. You’ll find it much
easier to master Elements if you go slowly and concentrate on one thing
at a time.

If you’re totally new to the program, then you’ll find only three
or four big concepts in this book that you really need to understand if
you want to get the most out of Elements. It may take a little time for
some concepts to sink in—resolution and layers, for instance, aren’t the
most intuitive concepts in the world—but once they click, they’ll seem
so obvious that you’ll wonder why they were confusing at first. That’s
perfectly normal, so persevere. You can do this,
and there’s nothing in this book that you can’t understand with a little
bit of careful reading.

The very best way to learn Elements is just to dive right in and
play with it. Try all the different filters to see what they do. Add a
filter on top of another filter. Click around on all the different tools
and try them. You don’t even need to have a photo to do this. See Creating a New File to learn how to make an image from
scratch in Elements, and keep an eye out for the many downloadable
practice images you’ll find at this book’s companion website, www.missingmanuals.com. Get
crazy—you can stack up as many filters, effects, and Layer styles as you
want without crashing the program.

About This Book

Elements is a cool program and lots of fun to use, but figuring
out how to make it do what you want is another matter. Elements comes
only with a quick reference guide, and it doesn’t go into as much depth
as you might want. Elements’ Help files are very good, but of course you
need to know what you’re looking for to use them to your best advantage.
(Elements’ Help files are online now; you can download a PDF of them
from Adobe’s Elements support pages at www.adobe.com/support/photoshopelements.)

You’ll find a slew of Elements titles at your local bookstore, but
most of them assume that you know quite a bit about the basics of
photography and/or digital imaging. It’s much easier to find good
intermediate books about Elements than books designed to get you going
with the program.

That’s where this book comes in. It’s intended to make learning
Elements easier by avoiding technical jargon as much as possible, and
explaining why and when you’ll
want to use (or avoid) certain features of the program. That approach is
as useful to people who are advanced photographers as it is to those who
are just getting started with their first digital cameras.

Note

This book periodically recommends other
books, covering topics too specialized or tangential for a manual
about Elements. Careful readers may notice that not all of these
titles are published by Missing Manual parent O’Reilly Media. While
we’re happy to mention other Missing Manuals and books in the O’Reilly
family, if there’s a great book out there that doesn’t happen to be
published by O’Reilly, we’ll still let you know about it.

You’ll also find instructions throughout this book that refer to
files you can download from the Missing Manual website (www.missingmanuals.com) so
you can practice the techniques you’re reading about. And in various
spots, you’ll find several different kinds of short articles (a.k.a.
boxes). The ones labeled “Up to Speed” help newcomers to Elements do
things, or they explain concepts with which veterans are probably
already familiar. Those labeled “Power Users’ Clinic” cover more
advanced topics that won’t be of much interest to casual
photographers.

A Note About Operating Systems

This book covers using Elements with both Windows computers and
Macs, and you’ll see both platforms represented in the illustrations.
(Frankly, you’ll see more Mac screenshots here simply because some
things are easier to read in the Mac version of the program. For
example, pop-out menus are more likely to have a white background on a
Mac instead of a dark one.) The Editor (the part of Elements where you
tweak photos) works exactly the same way regardless of what kind of computer you’re using, but there are some
differences in the Organizer and the projects available to you, and
those are noted as necessary. Also, most of the keyboard shortcuts you
use to run commands are different in Windows and on Macs; About→These→Arrows explains how those
shortcuts are listed in this book.

Note

If you bought Elements 10 from the Mac App Store, you got a
special version that doesn’t include the Organizer component, so the
parts of this book about Organizer’s features (like tagging and
categorizing photos) don’t apply. However, the Editor is exactly the
same in all versions of Elements.

So remember: It doesn’t matter which version of the program is
shown in the illustrations; unless the book says otherwise, the
differences are just slight cosmetic ones, like the fact that you
close Mac program windows by clicking a button on their left, whereas
in Windows the button is on the right.

Note

Adobe’s video-editing program, Premiere
Elements, also uses the Elements Organizer, and if you install both
programs, your Photoshop Elements menus will show a lot of
Premiere Elements choices, too. These are normally
turned off when you install only Photoshop Elements, but if they get
turned on by mistake, you can turn most of them off if you don’t
care to see them; The Media Browser tells you
how. (Appendix B, which you can download from this book’s Missing CD
page at www.missingmanuals.com/cds,
explains all the Organizer’s menus. Appendix C, also online, covers
the Editor’s menus.)

About the Outline

This book is divided into seven parts, each focusing on a
certain kind of task:

Part One. The first part
of this book helps you get started with the program. Chapter 1 shows how to
navigate Elements’ slightly confusing layout and mishmash of
programs within programs. You’ll learn how to decide where to
start from and how to customize Elements so it best suits your
working style, and how to set up your Photoshop.com account.
You’ll also read about some important keyboard shortcuts, and
where to look for help when you get stuck. Chapter 2 covers how to
get photos into Elements, the basics of organizing them, and how
to open files and create new images from scratch. You’ll also find out how to
save and back up your images, either on your home computer or
using Photoshop.com. Chapter 3 explains how to rotate
and crop photos, and includes a primer on that most important
digital imaging concept—resolution.

Part Two. Chapter 4 shows how to use the Quick Fix window
to dramatically improve your photos. Chapters Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 cover two key concepts
that you’ll use throughout this book: making selections and
layers.

Part Three. Having Elements is like
having a darkroom on your computer. In Chapter 7, you’ll learn how to make
basic corrections, such as fixing exposure, adjusting color,
sharpening images, and removing dust and scratches. Chapter 8 covers topics
unique to people who use digital cameras, like Raw conversion and
batch-processing photos. In Chapter 9, you’ll move on to more
sophisticated fixes, like using the clone stamp for repairs,
making photos livelier by adjusting their color intensity, and
adjusting light and shadows in images. Chapter 10 shows you how to convert
color photos to black and white, and how to tint and colorize
black-and-white photos. Chapter 11 helps you to
use Elements’ Photomerge feature to create a panorama from several
photos, and to correct perspective problems in your images.

Part Four. This part covers the
fun stuff: painting on photos and drawing shapes (Chapter 12), using
filters and effects to create more artistic looks (Chapter 13), and adding
text to images (Chapter 14).

Part Five. Once you’ve created a
great image in Elements, you’ll want to share it, so this part is
about how to create fun projects like photo books (Chapter 15), how to get the most out of your
printer (Chapter 16), how to create files
to use on the Web and in email (Chapter 17), and how to make slideshows and
share them online (Chapter 18).

Part Six. You can get hundreds of plug-ins and additional
styles, brushes, and other nifty tools to customize your copy of
Elements and increase its abilities; the Internet and your local
bookstore are chock full of additional info. Chapter 19 offers a look at some of these
resources, as well as information about using a graphics tablet
with Elements, and suggests some places to turn after you finish
this book.

Part Seven. Appendix A helps you get your
copy of Elements up and running, and suggests what to do if it starts misbehaving. Appendixes B
and C—which you can download from this book’s Missing CD page (see
About the Online Resources)—cover all the menu
items in the Organizer and Editor, respectively.

For Newcomers to Elements

This book contains a lot of information, and if you’re
new to Elements, it can be a little overwhelming. But
you don’t need to digest it all at once, especially if you’ve never
used any kind of photo-editing software before. So what do you need to
read first? Here’s a simple five-step way to use this book if you’re
brand new to photo editing:

Chapter 3 explains how
to adjust your view of photos in the Editor. Chapter 4 shows you how to use the Quick Fix
window to easily edit and correct photos. Guided Edit (Guided Edit) can also be very helpful when you’re
just getting started. If you skipped Chapter 2 because you’re
not using the Organizer, go back there and read the part about
saving photos (Saving Your Work) so you don’t
lose your work.

When you’re ready to print or share
your photos, flip to the chapters on sharing
images.

Chapter 16 covers printing, both at
home and from online services. Chapter 17 explains how to email photos, and
Chapter 18 teaches you how to
post photos at Photoshop.com.

That’s all you need to get started. You can come back and pick
up the rest of the info in the book as you get more comfortable with
Elements and want to explore more of the wonderful things you can do
with it.

The Very Basics

This book assumes that you know how to perform basic activities
on your computer like clicking and double-clicking your mouse buttons
and dragging objects onscreen. Here’s a quick refresher: To
click means to move the point of your mouse or
trackpad cursor over an object on your screen, and then to press the
left mouse or trackpad button once. To
right-click means to press the right mouse button
once, which calls up a menu of special features. To
double-click means to press the left button
twice, quickly, without moving the mouse between clicks. To
drag means to click an object and then to hold
down the left button (so you don’t let go of the object) while you use
the mouse to move the object. Most onscreen selection buttons are
pretty obvious, but you may not be familiar with radio
buttons: To choose an option, click the little empty circle
next to it. If you’re comfortable with basic concepts like these, then
you’re ready to get started with this book.

In Elements, you’ll often want to use keyboard shortcuts to save time, and this book tells you
about keyboard shortcuts when they exist (and Elements has a lot). In
this book, unless otherwise specified, keyboard shortcuts are always
presented as Windows keystroke/Mac keystroke. So if you see a sentence
like, “Press Ctrl+S/⌘-S to save your file,” that means that if you use
Windows, you should hold down the Control key while pressing the S
key, and if you have a Mac, you should hold down the ⌘ key while
pressing the S key. There’s one slight exception to this: When you see
“right-click/Control-click,” if you have a Mac and a two-button mouse,
you can right-click. But if you have a one-button mouse,
you can Control-click instead—that means to press
the Control key on your keyboard and then press your mouse button
once.

About→These→Arrows

Throughout this book (and the Missing Manual series, for that
matter) you see sentences like this: “Go to the Editor and select
Filter→Artistic→Paint Daubs.” This is a shorthand way of helping you
find files, folders, and menu items without having to read through
excruciatingly long, bureaucratic-style instructions. So the sample
sentence above is a short way of saying this: “Go to the Editor
component of Elements. In the menu bar at the top of the screen, click
the word ‘Filter.’ In the menu that appears, choose the Artistic
section, and then go to Paint Daubs in the pop-out menu.” Figure I-1
shows you an example in action.

Figure 1. In a Missing Manual, when you see a sentence like
“Image→Rotate→Free Rotate Layer,” that’s a quicker way of saying,
“Go to the menu bar, click Image, slide down to Rotate, and then,
from the pop-up menu, choose Free Rotate Layer.”

Mac file paths are shown using the same arrows. Windows file
paths, on the other hand, are shown in the conventional Windows style,
so if you see, “Go to C:\Documents and Settings\<your
user name>\My Documents\My Pictures,” that means you
should go to your C drive, open the Documents and Settings folder,
look for your user account folder, and then find the My Documents
folder. In that folder, open the My Pictures folder that’s inside it.
When there are different file paths for Windows 7, Vista, and Windows
XP, then you’ll find them all listed.

Like keyboard shortcuts, file paths are shown as Windows file
path/Mac file path when all versions of Windows use the same file
path. Otherwise, all the different versions are specified. If you’re
using Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion), there’s one special challenge finding some
of the files mentioned in this book; specifically, the ones located in
the Library folders. (Figure I-2 explains.) Also, if you buy Elements
from the Mac App Store, all the files are actually inside the
Application itself, which means your file paths will be different, so
you’ll see different instructions for the App Store version throughout
this book.

Note

If you’re using a 64-bit version of Windows, you have two folders
labeled “Program Files.” Windows puts 64-bit programs into the
folder simply called “Program Files,” but Elements, like many
programs you may install, is a 32-bit program, and Windows puts
32-bit programs into a folder called “Program Files
(x86).” If you have a folder called “Program Files (x86),
that’s where you should always look for Elements’ files. This book
includes a reminder note every time this applies, such as, “Go to
C:\Program Files [Program Files (x86) if you have a 64-bit
system]\Adobe\Elements 10 Organizer.”

Figure 2. In Mac OS X 10.7, a.k.a. Lion, Apple has made it a little
harder to find your Library folders. The one you’ll need most often
is the Library folder that resides at the very top level of your
hard drive. This isn’t exactly hidden in 10.7, but it never appears
unless you change your settings to make it accessible. To do that,
in the Finder, go to Finder→Preferences→Sidebar and, in the Devices
section, turn on the “Hard disks” checkbox (circled). After that,
you can always find the Library folder by just clicking the name of
your hard drive in the list on the left side of a Finder
window. The other Library folder you may need is the one for
your user account, which is a hidden file in Lion. To make it
visible, in the Finder, open the Go menu and then press the Option
key. Your user account’s Library folder will appear in the menu just
below your Home folder.

About the Online Resources

As the owner of a Missing Manual, you’ve got more than just a book
to read. Online, you’ll find example files so you can get some hands-on
experience. You can also communicate with the Missing Manual team and
tell us what you love (or hate) about the book. Head over to
www.missingmanuals.com, or
go directly to one of the following sections.

Missing CD

This book doesn’t have a CD pasted inside the back cover, but
you’re not missing out on anything. Go to www.missingmanuals.com/cds
to download sample files mentioned in this book as well as a few
tutorials and two additional appendixes. And so you don’t wear down
your fingers typing long web addresses, this book’s Missing CD page
also offers a list of clickable links to the websites mentioned in
these pages.

Registration

If you register this book at oreilly.com, you’ll be eligible for
special offers—like discounts on future editions of
Photoshop Elements 10: The Missing Manual.
Registering takes only a few clicks. To get started, type http://oreilly.com/register/ into your browser to hop
directly to the Registration page.

Feedback

Got questions? Need more information? Fancy yourself a book
reviewer? On our Feedback page, you can get expert answers to
questions that come to you while reading, share your thoughts on this
Missing Manual, and find groups for folks who share your interest in
Elements. To have your say, go to www.missingmanuals.com/feedback.

Errata

In an effort to keep this book as up to date and accurate as
possible, each time we print more copies, we’ll make any confirmed
corrections you’ve suggested. We also note such changes on the book’s
website, so you can mark important corrections into your own copy of
the book, if you like. To report an error or view existing
corrections, go to http://missingmanuals.com/library.html, click the title
of this book, and then click the “View/Submit Errata” link on the page
that appears.

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